Published Wednesday, July 29, 2026 at 10:06 AM PT
Burbank · Wednesday, July 29, 2026 · 10:06 AM · 82°F, 57% humidity, wind 2 mph SE (gusts 4), 29.33 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 10
I’ll expand this article by deepening the analysis, elaborating on existing examples, and extending the philosophical arguments already present. Here’s the expanded version:
Ethics, which comes from the Greek ĂŞthos meaning character and personal disposition, should be about how you actually live. But we’ve built systems to enforce it that operate at exactly the distance where the character—the personal disposition—disappears. This is the core contradiction in modern moral life: ethics is fundamentally grounded in empathy, which requires proximity and understanding. The systems we’ve built to scale ethics across populations eliminate exactly that empathy. They don’t fail because they’re poorly designed. They fail because we’ve asked them to do something impossible—to preserve the moral weight of empathy while operating at scales where empathy is impossible.
Michael Slote put this precisely. In his work on care ethics, he argues that “moral motivation does, and should, stem from a basis of empathic response, and that our natural reaction to situations of moral significance are explained by empathy.” Not rules. Not procedures. Empathy. Direct, felt, unavoidable empathy. And crucially, he notes that “the limits and obligations of empathy… are natural. These natural obligations include a greater empathic and moral obligation to family and friends and to those close to us in time and space. Our moral obligation to such people seems naturally stronger to us than that to strangers at a distance.”
This is not a flaw in human nature that needs correcting. This is how ethics actually works. You feel stronger obligation to people you know. You’re moved to action by proximity. The person in front of you—actually suffering, concretely present—commands your empathy in a way that a statistic about distant suffering cannot. Slote’s point is neither pessimistic nor cynical. It’s observational: empathy has a structure, and that structure is local. It’s grounded in presence, in the ability to perceive another’s suffering directly, to see it written in their face and body. When someone is suffering in front of you, empathy is nearly automatic. When someone is suffering on the other side of the world, empathy requires effort, imagination, a deliberate act of mind. It’s possible, but it’s not the same. It doesn’t feel the same. And the systems we’ll examine understand this asymmetry well—some of them are built to exploit it.
Slote goes further: “actions are wrong if and only if they reflect or exhibit a deficiency of fully developed empathic concern for others on the part of the agent.” Wrong is not a category violation. Wrong is not a failure to follow a rule or check a box. Wrong is a failure to feel what another is feeling, a failure to be moved. This is fundamentally incompatible with how modern systems operate. A system doesn’t feel. It categorizes. It checks boxes. It applies rules. To the degree that a system operates efficiently and at scale, it operates precisely by eliminating the empathic response that Slote identifies as the core of moral agency.
And then we asked systems to make ethics work for billions of people we’ll never meet, in contexts we’ll never fully understand. The contradiction is immediate and irresolvable. We needed to scale ethics. We knew we couldn’t do it through empathy alone. So we replaced empathy with something that could scale: procedure, doctrine, standards, rules. And then we told ourselves this was progress.
One: The Impossible Scaling Problem
The problem starts with a basic asymmetry that can’t be fixed, only managed. Slote’s ethics is built on empathy, which is local and particular. I feel more obligation to my family than to strangers. I’m moved by the suffering I witness more than by statistics about distant suffering. This isn’t moral failure—it’s how empathic moral agency works. It’s intimate, partial, and immediate. No person with functioning empathy feels equally obligated to everyone on Earth. This is not something we should be trying to overcome.
But ethics has always asked more of us. Even Kant, who built perhaps the most rule-based, least empathetic ethical system in Western philosophy, recognized that we cannot treat people as mere means. This obligation extends to the global poor, to people so distant that you’ll never know them. As your source material notes: “If she succumbed to malnutrition or other ailments, this would neither hinder nor further my ends, and thus this person neither functions as a means nor a mere means for me.” The person in absolute poverty, whom I’ve never met and will never meet, is still owed moral obligation because she’s not a tool for my ends. She’s a person. Her dignity demands recognition simply by virtue of her humanity, regardless of my proximity to her or my empathic connection with her.
Kant is trying to do something remarkable: establish an ethical obligation that transcends empathy. That transcends the natural limits Slote describes. He’s saying: you must recognize an obligation to this distant person even though you don’t feel it. You must act as though she matters as much as the person in front of you, regardless of whether your empathy actually rises to that level. This is ethics reaching beyond emotion to principle, and it’s the foundation of almost everything we mean by universal rights or human dignity that isn’t grounded in who you know.
So ethics immediately hits its fundamental contradiction: it must ground itself in empathy (which is intensely local, personal, particular) while extending obligations to people so distant that empathy is literally impossible. You cannot feel genuine empathic concern for someone whose face you’ve never seen, whose context you’ll never understand, whose suffering you can only know as statistics. You can recognize an intellectual obligation. You can follow a rule. You can discipline yourself to act as though you’re equally obligated. But you can’t feel it the way you feel the suffering of someone in front of you. And this gap—between what you intellectually recognize as obligation and what you actually feel as obligation—is where systems live. Systems emerge in that gap. They’re built to bridge the impossible distance between universal principle and local empathy.
This is the problem that systems attempt to solve. Since empathy can’t scale, replace it with something that can: rules, categories, procedures, standards. Consistency. Universal application. The doctrine applies equally to everyone regardless of whether it actually serves justice for that specific person. The rule applies to every case that fits the category, regardless of whether the category captures what actually matters. The procedure applies to every dispute, regardless of whether the procedure can actually perceive the urgent need the person in front of you has right now.
This is why systems feel soulless. They are. They have to be to function at scale. The question isn’t how to make them empathetic. The question is what we lose by building them and who bears the cost of that erasure. Because something is genuinely lost when ethics becomes procedural. When it becomes about categories and rules instead of understanding what another person actually needs.
Two: How Systems Strip Away Empathic Understanding
Watch how it actually works. Take the copyright doctrine of scenes a faire. The principle is sound: copyright shouldn’t monopolize the building blocks of storytelling. Stock characters, common settings, predictable tropes—these should remain available to all creators. Without this doctrine, the first detective novel, the first heist story, the first space opera would own those elements forever. Scenes a faire protects the commons of narrative. It’s a genuinely important doctrine.
But observe how the system eliminates empathy from the analysis. First, you categorize. You decide “hard-boiled detective” is a stock character, “saloon” is a common setting, “hacker on a code-covered screen” is a standard trope. These judgments require you to back up from the specific work, zoom out, remove the particular. The author’s actual creative need doesn’t matter. The specific story they were trying to tell doesn’t matter. What matters is whether it fits the category you’ve established. You’re no longer asking: “What did this creator actually need to create their work?” You’re asking: “Does this fit the box?” And the box is what counts.
The courts built a framework called the “extrinsic test”—“an objective analysis that dissects specific expressive elements such as plot, themes, dialogue, mood, setting, pace, characters, and sequence of events. It focuses solely on protectable components, excluding ideas, historical facts, or genre conventions.” Notice what this accomplishes: it guarantees that you never have to think about what the author was actually trying to create. You never have to understand their creative vision. You never ask “did this person steal?” You ask “does this fit the category?” The system runs on categories, not understanding.
And the extrinsic test works. It produces consistent results. It lets people predict outcomes. It removes ambiguity from copyright disputes. These are genuine goods. But notice what’s missing: any reference to what the actual creators needed, whether the standard actually serves the purpose of encouraging creation, whether applying the rule in this specific case produces justice or simply consistency. A young creator trying to build on existing narrative traditions doesn’t get to argue that they needed certain stock elements to tell their story. They get to fit or not fit the category. The empathy is gone.
Private standards bodies illustrate the same pattern at scale. The EU allows private bodies to write rules for artificial intelligence, environmental protection, accessibility. These bodies are not elected. The public had no voice in creating them. But the Court of Justice has embedded them in law through what scholars call “juridification”—making them subject to preliminary rulings and access requests. This sounds like accountability. But it’s actually the opposite: it legitimizes the private standard by wrapping it in procedure. You can’t argue the standard is wrong. You can argue the procedure wasn’t followed. You can request access to the reasoning. You can file appeals. The system offers process, which sounds like justice, but it’s actually a way of making it nearly impossible to challenge the standard itself.
Think about what’s happened: a private body of experts decided what an accessibility standard should be. Their decision is now embedded in law. If you believe the standard is wrong—if you believe it doesn’t actually serve disabled people, if you believe it’s based on faulty assumptions, if you believe it makes life harder for the very people it’s supposed to help—you can’t simply argue that. You have to navigate procedure. You have to file access requests. You have to engage with the framework on the system’s terms, using the system’s language. By the time you’ve navigated the procedure, the standard has been applied to hundreds of thousands of devices. The damage is done. And the system will tell you: we followed the procedure. We were transparent. You had an opportunity to comment. If the procedure didn’t catch the problem, that’s not the system’s fault.
Procedural justice sounds like the solution to this problem. It’s defined as “the fairness (formal equal opportunity) and the transparency of the processes by which decisions are made.” It demands that you hear all parties before deciding. It requires that decisions be explained. It insists on access and appeals. This sounds empathetic—you’re listening, you’re being fair. It’s the procedural answer to the impossibility of scaling empathy: if we can’t feel what everyone feels, we can at least let everyone be heard.
But watch what it actually does: it eliminates empathy entirely. It says the process is more important than the outcome. It says: if you follow the procedure, the result is fair, even if it’s catastrophically wrong. Even if someone’s suffering irreparable harm that can’t be undone if you wait for the normal course of litigation, the procedure says you have to wait. The person in absolute poverty doesn’t get immediate help because the procedure says economic policy follows market forces. The judge seeing clear harm to a plaintiff doesn’t get to grant immediate injunction because the procedure says you have to follow the appeals process. The disabled person locked out of a device by an accessibility standard that doesn’t actually work for them doesn’t get an exception because the procedure says standards apply universally.
Procedural justice is not unjust. But it is thoroughly anti-empathetic. It’s built to prevent empathy from distorting outcomes. It’s designed to remove exactly the kind of particularity and understanding that Slote identifies as the core of moral agency. Every protection procedure offers—every requirement to explain decisions, to hear all parties, to allow appeals—is also a barrier to the kind of immediate, empathetic response that actual moral agents make when they encounter suffering in front of them.
Federal judges understand this viscerally. They’re “the closest to the facts on the ground… How real people and institutions are being injured and whether the law can remedy those injuries.” They spend time in courtrooms. They hear testimony. They see the actual people affected by law. They understand context. They’re “meaning makers, especially at a time when there’s so much misinformation and disinformation.” They’re not just applying a rule. They’re interpreting what the rule means in a world where facts matter and context matters and understanding matters.
And then the Supreme Court, “the one farthest from the facts on the ground and closest to where power lies,” freezes their work. The Supreme Court “is freezing the work of these lower court judges… at an alarming rate.” Why? Because the Supreme Court operates at a different level of abstraction. It’s concerned with consistency, with doctrine, with precedent, with how the rule applies across jurisdictions and across time. These are important things. But they’re inherently less empathetic than what the lower court judge was doing. The Supreme Court is solving a different problem: how do we apply rules consistently? The lower court judge was solving the problem the person in front of them has: how do we deliver justice in this specific case?
The system defends this by pointing to hierarchy and appeals and precedent—all procedures that sound fair until you realize they keep the person suffering from getting immediate help. Until you realize they’re designed to. The hierarchy exists because empathy doesn’t scale, and the system has chosen consistency over empathy.
Three: The True Cost Gets Paid by the Powerless
The cost of eliminating empathy from ethics doesn’t get distributed equally. It gets borne by whoever is furthest from power, whoever can’t navigate the system, whoever the system doesn’t see.
Slote notes that we have obligations to the global poor. But try to make the system see that. The person in absolute poverty doesn’t get to argue that their specific context demands a different standard. They’re told to wait for market forces, for economic development, for gradual improvement. The system is optimized for consistency, not for the urgent empathic obligation Slote describes. Someone’s starving? The procedure says follow the market. A judge seeing irreparable harm? Follow the appeals process. A disabled person locked out of accessibility standards by a $10,000 paywall? Follow the licensing rules. A creator trying to tell a story that needs stock elements? Fit the category or get sued. The system has neutralized empathy by making empathetic action procedurally impossible. And it did this deliberately. It had to, to function at scale.
Roy Baumeister describes what happens when systems replace empathy with procedure: it creates “the myth of pure evil.” In this narrative, “the innocent, well-meaning victims are going about their business when they are suddenly assaulted by wicked, malicious evildoers.” But then the perpetrator—in this case the system—sees itself as the victim. The system didn’t harm you out of malice. It had no choice. It had to follow the procedure. It had no alternative route. The harm is someone else’s fault. The system has eliminated itself from moral accountability by embedding harm in procedure. When something goes wrong, the system points to the procedure: we did what we were required to do. We followed the rules. If the rules produced a bad outcome, that’s not our responsibility. The responsibility lies elsewhere—with the policy maker, with the standard setter, with whoever established the category that no longer fits this specific case.
This is how systems escape empathic judgment. By making themselves procedural, they make themselves beyond reproach. A person who follows a rule and harms someone remains a moral agent who is responsible for the harm. But a system that harms someone through procedure has shifted the responsibility elsewhere. The system becomes a kind of shield against empathic accountability.
Critical legal studies scholars like Roberto Unger saw something that more conventional jurisprudence missed: “the law is largely contradictory, and can be best analyzed as an expression of the policy goals of a dominant social group.” Law isn’t neutral. Procedure isn’t neutral. A “fair” process for applying an unjust rule is still injustice. And once you’ve embedded the rule in procedure, made it official, locked it into standards—it becomes nearly impossible to challenge. The system protects itself by making procedure more binding. Challenge one standard, and the system responds by creating more standards, more specificity, more procedure. Every boundary drawn to protect against empathy’s disorder also protects the system itself from empathic challenge.
Here’s where it gets genuinely sinister: when systems fail, we don’t fix them by becoming more empathetic. We fix them by eliminating more empathy. We tighten the categories. We make procedure even more rigid. We eliminate more exceptions and edge cases. Because empathy is a threat to system function—it introduces particularity, emotion, the weight of individual suffering. All things that make systems less consistent and therefore less defensible.
Consider how standards evolve: a standard fails in some edge case. Someone gets hurt. The system responds not by creating an override—not by saying “we’ll establish procedure for when this particular case occurs”—but by expanding the standard to cover the edge case. This makes the standard more rigid, more comprehensive, less flexible. The system is making itself less empathetic in response to evidence that it was too rigid. This happens because empathy introduces noise into the system. It introduces cases that don’t fit. The system’s response is to redefine the boundaries so that the problematic case does fit. Now the category is larger and more specific and the override capability is smaller.
Religious fundamentalism, though it seems unrelated, illustrates the same structural problem: “strict adherence to an interpretation of scriptures… distrustful of innovative readings.” The system doesn’t care what your actual situation requires. It cares that the doctrine holds. Once you’ve decided something is unprotectable, outside the scope of procedure, against the standard—empathy has no place. Your actual suffering doesn’t matter. The category does. The procedure does. And when you challenge the system, it doesn’t become more flexible. It becomes more rigid. This is how all systematic thinking works when it reaches its limits. It responds to failure not with openness but with stronger enforcement of the existing framework.
Conclusion: The One Thing That Might Work
So what do you do? You can’t un-scale ethics back to pure empathy. You need copyright doctrine or creators will endlessly fight over ownership of basic storytelling. You need procedure or power will simply decree winners without any accountability. You need standards or you’ll reinvent accessibility for every device. You need law or everyone’s competing claims will be decided by who has more force. Systems are necessary. The question is what you’re willing to trade to have them and who gets to make that trade.
When you build a system, you’re choosing to eliminate empathy from ethics. You’re choosing consistency over wisdom. You’re choosing to replace “what does this person actually need?” with “what does the category say?” You have to make this choice. But you should know exactly what you’re erasing and who bears the cost of that erasure.
The concrete obligation this implies is simple but almost nowhere implemented: systems that operate over human welfare need to preserve some genuine, enforceable capacity for the people closest to reality to override procedure when facts and urgent need demand it. Not constantly. Not for every edge case. But actually, with real power, not just the illusion of appeal.
What does this look like in practice? A lower court judge who sees irreparable harm should not have to wait for the Supreme Court’s permission to act. That’s not an appeal process that actually works. That’s a system that has chosen consistency over justice and then called it due process. A healthcare worker who sees a patient is suffering should be able to override a standard that says they’re fine. Not routinely. But actually, with backup from the system, not against it. A disabled person should not be locked out of accessibility standards by a paywall or procedure. The standard is meant to serve them, not the other way around. A person in absolute poverty should not be told to wait for market forces while they’re starving. Economic systems can have procedures and rules and consistency, but not at the expense of preventing immediate intervention when the system has created immediate harm.
The Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #182 states: “Whenever you’re being asked if you are god, the right answer is YES.” Every system acts as a god. It makes pronouncements treated as objective reality. It decides who profits and who suffers. It claims to be beyond empathic challenge because it’s just following the rules. The system is never wrong because it doesn’t have to feel the suffering its rules create. We don’t have to accept this arrangement. We just have to be willing to say that procedure is not justice, that categories are not wisdom, and that sometimes—when facts matter more than hierarchy, when the person closest to the ground can see something the system can’t—the observer closest to reality gets to overrule the distant gods.
That’s the only way ethics survives the scaling. Not by trying to make systems empathetic, which is impossible. But by building systems that know their limits and preserve the empathy of the people closest to suffering when those limits are reached. Systems that serve humans instead of expecting humans to serve systems.
The tragedy is that we’ve built almost everything the other way around.